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Making Islam (not terrorism) disappear

We have met the enemy and he is “self-radicalization.” No, wait: We have met the enemy and he is the Internet. We have met the enemy and he is broadband video?

“But this is hard stuff,” President Obama tried to explain in this week’s press conference. “Because of the pressure that we put on al-Qaida’s core, because of the pressure that we’ve put on these networks that are well-financed and more sophisticated and can engage in and project transnational threats against the United States, one of the dangers that we now face are self-radicalized individuals who are already here in the United States — in some cases, may not be part of any kind of network, but because of whatever warped, twisted ideas they may have, may decide to carry out an attack. And those are in some ways more difficult to prevent.”

More difficult to prevent? Ridiculous. But this is also a disgraceful thing to say under these circumstances. What Obama describes is the Keystone Cops case because he decided, as a matter of “Muslim outreach,” to shut his eyes to the motivation of such attacks — Islam, jihad, Allah’s law (sharia) — and ordered our security agencies and military to shut their eyes, too.

It is a fact that in concert with the Oct. 19, 2011, demands of an array of Islamic advocacy groups, including government-identified Muslim Brotherhood front groups (the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, for example), the Obama administration subsequently ordered the “purge” of any training materials and trainers still teaching the history and doctrine of jihad at government security agencies and throughout the military. This unconscionable act of eliminating our first line of defense — in effect, shutting down national security’s eyes and ears, and, worse, logic itself — is what accounts for the successful cycle of jihad that marks our era of decline. To be fair, it is not all Obama’s fault. The current administration’s see-no-Islam policy is an extension and amplification of the see-no-Islam policy initiated by President George W. Bush.

When a handful of House Republicans led by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota last summer raised the see-no-Islam “purge” and related issues with justified alarm, these remnant patriots in Congress were crucified as “Islamophobes” and scorned as lunatics. And now? No one in that Bachmann lynch mob (Obama administration, media, and, profiles in courage, GOP leadership) wants us to put things together now. They don’t want us to realize that those two vicious bombs that exploded in Boston last month might well have been prevented had Bachmann & Co.’s warnings been heeded.

How? On government order, the FBI doesn’t know — can’t know — that it is actually fighting Islamic jihad and sharia subversion. The kind of review Bachmann hoped for could possibly have saved fact-based analysis at the FBI and related agencies. To grasp the stupefying impact of the see-no-Islam status quo, imagine the FBI of the Cold War era officially denying and suppressing the role Marxism played in animating subversives. No communist espionage rings would ever have been stopped.

Such blindness is the official rule today. An examination of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon, which was published in 2008 at the end of the Bush administration, shows that the words “Islam,” “Muslim,” “jihad,” “Muslim Brotherhood,” even “al-Qaida” — all of which appear in the 9/11 Commission Report — have disappeared entirely from the lexicon of FBI analysis. Instead, agents must focus on the literally meaningless concept of “violent extremism.” As if that’s not mentally paralyzing enough, the FBI definition of violent extremism includes this: “An analytical judgment that an individual is a ‘violent extremist,’ ‘extremist,’ or ‘radical’ is not predication for any investigative action or technique.”

Another way to view such a security shambles is to say, as the president did, that the FBI performed well in the run-up to Boston 4/15. “The FBI investigated that older brother,” he said. “It’s not as if the FBI did nothing. They not only investigated the older brother, they interviewed the older brother. They concluded that there were no signs that he was engaging in extremist activity.”

This makes perfect sense — in the government’s see-no-Islam world. FBI agents, operating by the book, might well have tagged Tamerlan Tsarnaev a “violent extremist,” and then, also operating by the book, done nothing. Ka-boom. Having de-Islamized counterterrorism techniques, Obama could then say: “Based on what I’ve seen so far, the FBI performed its duties, the Department of Homeland Security did what it was supposed to be doing.”

According to U.S. government’s see-no-Islam policy, Obama is correct. In fact, for meritorious achievement leading up to the Boston bombing, special commendations for all U.S. security personnel up to and including cabinet secretaries from Justice, Homeland Security and the Pentagon are in order. The Obama team effort may not have stopped terrorism, but it sure made Islam disappear.

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